He clasped her tight in his arms. Rue let him embrace her unresistingly. She kissed him long and hard, and nestled there tenderly. For fifty whole seconds she was in heaven indeed. At last, with a little start, she broke away and left him. “Now go,” she said, standing a yard or two off, and gazing at him, tearfully. “Go at once and fetch her. Every moment she stops in your rooms is compromising. . . . Go, go; goodbye! . . . You’re mine no longer. But, Will, don’t be afraid I shall be sad when she comes! I’ll have my good cry out in my own room first; and, by the time she arrives, I’ll be smiling to receive her!” CHAPTER XLIV AND WILL’S At Will’s chambers, meanwhile, Linnet sat and waited, her flushed face in her hands, her hot ears tingling. She had plenty of time in Will’s absence to reflect and to ruminate. Horror and shame for her own outspokenness began to overcome her. If Will had accepted her sacrifice, indeed, as frankly as she offered it, that profound emotional nature would have felt nothing of the kind: her passion would have hallowed and sanctified her love in her own eyes—not as the Church could have done, to be sure; not from the religious side at all; but still, from the alternative point of view of the human heart, which to her was almost equally sacred in its way, ’twould have hallowed and sanctified it. Linnet would have regarded her union with Will as sinful and wrong, but not as impure or unholy; she wouldn’t have attempted to justify it, but she would never have felt ashamed of it. She recognised it as the union imposed upon her by the laws of her own highest nature; the laws of God, as she understood them, might forbid it and punish it—they never could make it anything else for her than pure and beautiful and true and ennobling. But Will’s refusal, for her own sake, to accept her self-surrender, filled her soul with shame for her slighted womanhood. She understood Will’s reasons; she saw how unselfish and kind were his motives; but still, the sense remained that she had debased herself before him, all to no purpose. She had offered him the most precious gift a woman can offer to any man—and _he_, he had rejected it. Linnet bowed down her head in intense humiliation. On her own scheme of life, she would have been far less dishonoured by Will’s accepting her then and there, in a hot flood of passion, than by his proposal to wait till she could get a purely meaningless and invalid release from her sacrament with Andreas. Having once made up her mind to desert her husband and follow her own heart, in spite of ultimate consequences, it seemed to her almost foolish that Will should shrink on her account from the verdict of the world, when she herself did not shrink—so great was her love—from the wrath of heaven and eternal punishment.